Isidore Verheyden was a Belgian artist predominantly known for landscapes, portraits and still life. He was a member of the Belgian Royal Academy. He trained under Joseph Quinaux, Jean-François Portaels and Théodore Baron. And also taught numerous students including Jean Laudy. His works are held in various public collections including the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium.
Exhibited
Brussels Salon, Munich Annual Exhibition at the Glass Palace, Great Berlin Art Exhibition, International Art Exhibition Munich.
Public Collections
Museum M in Leuven, Musée d'Orsay, MSK Gent, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Emile Van Doren Museum.
Timeline
1846
Born in Antwerp, Belgium. The son of artist Jean-François Verheyden and Mélanie Horgnies.
Studied under Joseph Quinaux at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts of Brussels.
1866
Studied under Jean-François Portaels.
Studied under Théodore Baron.
1868
Became a founding member of the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts, which was progressive and anti-academic.
1873
Lived in Hoeilaart.
1883
Moved to Brussels.
1884
Became a member of Les XX.
1893
Review of the Brussels Salon in La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité: supplément à la Gazette des beaux-arts.
"Mr. Isidore Verheyden, in an excellent canvas, entitled Les Libellules, was able to create an essentially modern work without forgetting the teaching of the masters, because it is a figure of a bather, large as life, or almost. Mr. Verheyden has remarkably taken advantage of his very serious aptitude as a landscaper and we have here a set where nothing is conventional, a piece of high pictorial value, because, if the painter did not seek to purify the form, he also does not have to be forgiven for the vulgarities for which, in our time, the subject he has chosen too often serves as a pretext. Finally, a portraitist, Mr. Verheyden is still the author of an excellent portrait of a child."
1900
Became a teacher and director at the Academy of Brussels.
1905
Died in Elsene, Belgium.
Obituary
L'Humanité: Journal socialiste quotidien.
"A very talented Belgian painter has just died in Brussels, at the age of sixty. It is Isidore Verheyden. A portraitist and landscape painter, he was the moving evocator of the pearly beauties of the western sky, whose mists he rendered with delicate and subtle precision. He was a friend of Constantin Meunier whose effigy he traced many times and who even died in his arms. Verheyden's work is considerable and exerted a great influence on young art. Verheyden's civil funeral took place yesterday."
Mercure de France: Série moderne / directeur Alfred Vallette
"The year 1905 ended with two bereavements, one in the world of the arts, the other in that of letters. We will mourn for a long time and we will undoubtedly remember with constant veneration the great and good painter Isidore Verheyden, director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, one of the most robust and most delightful of our realists who excelled at the same time in landscape, in still life and in portrait (I am thinking in particular of an admirable portrait of Mme Lucien Solvay), but who above all painted as a friend and as a poet the humble and healthy workers of the Soigne forest: clogmakers, loggers, pit sawyers. Verheyden belonged to this brilliant generation of painters born between 1840 and 1850, who made us wonderful champions of the Flemish wilderness.
Verheyden, born in 1846, was of Antwerp origin; but from his youth he moved to Brussels, which he only left to go and paint from time to time in Kempen, Zeeland and Flanders. Camille Lemonnier, who knew him at the time when his studies for Le Male took the brilliant writer to the villages on the edge of the Soigne forest, wrote somewhere, addressing Verheyden: 'While you remained for me a faithful companion, I followed you in your valiant career, I watched your rough and tender soul grow a little more through your communions with nature. The vision of things was imprinted in your clear eyes with such nervous intensity that you appeared to me in all its expression the organism of the painter. And what you were then, you have not ceased to remain, with greater certainty and breadth, in the magnificent abundance of your production.'"
Art and artists: monthly review of ancient and modern art
"A disappearance that must be noted because it leaves a big void in the Belgian school: that of Isidore Verheyden, landscape painter and portrait painter, one of the last survivors of the famous Portaels workshop who are so many valuable artists. Verheyden was among the first to direct their research towards luminism. He had been part of the famous group of XV and the vigour, the scrupulous awareness of his art had retained great boldness and sincerity. He held the advanced painting course at the Brussels Academy. He was only fifty-nine years old."